MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - PRS-500 to get EPUB support after all?

porkupan · 08-14-2009, 11:05 AM

igorsk, what do you think, how many PRS-500 owners are still out there? Not the total number, but the number of people, who actually buy books at Sony eBook Store and generate some sort of revenue for Sony? One thousand? Two thousand? Fifty thousand?

The ADE license according to Robertb costs 70K per device model. Plus development costs to integrate into the Reader FW (probably including the Mass Storage Device emulation driver). Plus making the new FW updater that will rearrange the partitions in the flash and remove some of the books from /Data in order to shrink it to the newly allowed maximum size. Plus the customer service effort to support the angry callers whose devices have been messed up by the process. Is it worth it? Or is it a charity effort, a good will gesture?

Perhaps you are right, and there will be an update. That would mean Sony is going all out for EPUB support. Sony, which two years ago announced that it wasn't making any more FW updates for PRS-500, is all of a sudden making an exception in this case... This is very hard to believe. The "update path" statement is just vague enough to not commit to anything in particular.

08-14-2009, 11:05 AM	#19
porkupan Fanatic Posts: 556 Karma: 1057213 Join Date: Sep 2006 Location: North Eastern U.S. Device: Sony Reader	igorsk, what do you think, how many PRS-500 owners are still out there? Not the total number, but the number of people, who actually buy books at Sony eBook Store and generate some sort of revenue for Sony? One thousand? Two thousand? Fifty thousand? The ADE license according to Robertb costs 70K per device model. Plus development costs to integrate into the Reader FW (probably including the Mass Storage Device emulation driver). Plus making the new FW updater that will rearrange the partitions in the flash and remove some of the books from /Data in order to shrink it to the newly allowed maximum size. Plus the customer service effort to support the angry callers whose devices have been messed up by the process. Is it worth it? Or is it a charity effort, a good will gesture? Perhaps you are right, and there will be an update. That would mean Sony is going all out for EPUB support. Sony, which two years ago announced that it wasn't making any more FW updates for PRS-500, is all of a sudden making an exception in this case... This is very hard to believe. The "update path" statement is just vague enough to not commit to anything in particular. Last edited by porkupan; 08-14-2009 at 11:13 AM.